Florida's Story Comes Through In History And Fiction Books

LIFE IN OSCEOLA - Osceola's HISTORY

April 10, 2005|By Jim Robison, Special to the Sentinel

I found out a little more about Florida last week, and it wasn't flattering.

Last Sunday, I attended the premiere viewing of historical novelist Patrick Smith's DVD about a Florida that now exists only in memories. Patrick Smith's Florida: A Sense of Place allows Smith, the narrator, to retrace the places he went to research his novels: Angel City, about the humble and horrid life of migrant laborers in Florida; two other works of fiction based on his life among Florida Seminoles, Forever Island and Allapattah; and his most-honored story of three generations of Florida Crackers, A Land Remembered.

I followed that up by reading Diane Roberts' history of Florida told, primarily, through the lives of eight generations of her extended family, Dream State. The subtitle is "Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and Other Florida Wildlife." She is a funny and entertaining writer, and her comedy can be very painful because it is so true and takes Florida right up to its most embarrassing time, the present. Smith was kind enough to end his generational story in the 1960s, when the Florida frontier he remembers still had a chance.

Roberts contrasts Patrick Smith's never-happened story, A Land Remembered, with her own family's really-did-happen memories that read like fiction. She drags her wacky relatives into the Florida of hanging chads and the presidential election of 2000. Throughout her book, she returns to the present and a Florida from a time most of us would rather forget.

Her how-we-got-here reality is a stark contrast to Smith's fictional family of a land remembered that was never really there. Smith's book reads like it really happened. But Roberts' Dream State is reality.

In Smith's world, Florida was this nation's first frontier -- and one of its last. In Roberts' world, Florida is no longer a frontier; it's frontage.

Smith is reverent. Roberts is irreverent.

Smith's based-on-fact-but-fictional Floridians share frontier values of family, home, responsibility. Roberts' tale of her family's Florida generations points out that Smith's frontier is gone, or just about gone.

Smith, as narrator, acknowledges that frontier Florida is gone.

"It all started right here when those little Spanish galleons touched down on Florida shores," Smith narrates at the opening of the DVD produced by his son and other family members.

He notes that in 1861, when Southern states went to war to withdraw from the Union, the east coast of Florida was home to just 300 people, and of that, some 200 of them lived along a short stretch of the Indian River. The interior that included the land between the Kissimmee and St. Johns rivers was home to only a few widely scattered Cracker homesteaders, some deserters hiding out until the war ended and a few hundred Seminoles.

And, it stayed that way for a long, long time.

Two decades after the Civil War ended, state lawmakers made Kissimmee the new seat of government for Osceola County, carved out of portions of Brevard and Orange counties. On Aug. 6, 1887, when the Osceola County Commission convened for the first time, three months after the new county was created, they represented 815 pioneer settlers spread out over 1,325 square miles. (Osceola County's population is now more than 200,000.)

That's nothing. Consider this: The city of Kissimmee, with a population of 50,000-plus people today, has more residents than all of Florida did when it won statehood in 1845. Florida and Texas, then both slave states, offset newly admitted free states Michigan and Iowa to keep the balance in Congress.

Smith's Florida "frontier" lasted halfway into the 1900s.

After most of the rest of the nation, including the Wild West, was settled, much of Florida was still open range for cattle. Smith adds, "As late as 1947, you could drive a herd of cattle from Fort Pierce on the east coast to Fort Myers on the west coast and not come to a fence."

And, if you were hungry, you could stop at roadside orange and grapefruit groves and pick all you needed to eat. Old-timers, including some in my family, still ignore "no-trespass" signs at those corporate groves, but they do so with one eye looking out for shotguns.

In 1947, the total population of Big Pine Key, the second-largest of the Florida Keys, was seven people, even though Key West had been among the most populated areas in pre-Civil War Florida.

Roberts writes in Dream State, "There had always been two Floridas, silk hat and wool hat, white shoes and no shoes."

Roberts has found a way to condense entire histories into a few simple words or paragraphs. Midway through her book, she writes about a key period in Kissimmee's history -- between the end of the Civil War in the spring of 1865 and the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971.